Summer Projects: Victorian Lahore

I have long had a particular interest in Rudyard Kipling's early work -- especially his years in Lahore (1882-1887), where he worked as a journalist while living with his parents and, some of the time, his sister.  This summer I am doing a project on him, and using a sister blog, which I am calling "In the Library," as a kind of white-board where I am posting bits and pieces of research. 


The main project is described below. From time to time I may use this space to synthesize what I am learning through my research. 

Rudyard Kipling is a disliked, sometimes reviled figure in postcolonial literary studies in large part because of his uncomplicated support for British Imperialism – but there is more to him than the familiar image of him as an arch-Imperialist might suggest. As is widely known, in his later years Kipling authored quite a bit of jingoistic war-related poetry, much of it inflected with overtones of racial superiority. I am not interested redeeming or apologizing for that Kipling; the charge that he would become one of the prime advocates of British Imperialism is not under question.

But what about the younger Kipling? What about the young man who spent seven enthusiastic years (1882-1889) as a journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, who wrote playfully and even affectionately about the country in books like Plain Tales From the Hills (1888), The Jungle Book (1894), and Kim (1901)? Before he said that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” Kipling, in Kim, movingly and compellingly described the Mughal-built Grand Trunk Road as a “wonderful spectacle” and a “river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.” The early Kipling was deeply fascinated by India, though he was always uneasy and limited in his relationships with actual Indians as well as Eurasians.

I am interested in two factors that seemed to shape the young Kipling as an India enthusiast: 1) Kipling’s Indian journalism, especially his work at the Civil & Military Gazette, and 2) Lockwood Kipling’s role in shaping his son Rudyard’s ideas about race and religion in Punjab, as expressed in his journalism and early short stories from the 1880s.

Biographers such as Charles Allen (Kipling Sahib, 2009) have indicated that one of the key sources of much of Rudyard’s passion for the country, and much of his primary knowledge, was likely his father, John Lockwood Kipling. After teaching as a professor at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay for a decade, Lockwood and Alice Kipling moved to Lahore in 1875, where Lockwood worked as the Principal of the Mayo School of Arts, and where he was appointed as curator of the Lahore Museum. Lockwood was also a prolific illustrator of Indian animals. His collection of his sketches and stories about Indian animals (Beast and Man in India, 1891) is of as much interest as a work of ethnography as it is of zoology, and one surmises – though no biographer has confirmed it – that his son’s unforgettable anthropomorphizing of jungle life in The Jungle Book may have been inspired by the imaginative world represented in his father’s drawings. But while Lockwood Kipling, as the curator of a Museum largely devoted to Indian artifacts, was committed to understanding and preserving pre-British Indo-Islamic culture in a way that his son never would be, biographers have also suggested that his benevolence had its limits: Lockwood had a clear sense of the rightful separation of white (“British”) and “Oriental” (non-white) races that his son would also embrace and then, later, amplify. Allen, in his biography, pins Rudyard’s first awareness of the power of racial ideology to the fallout from the Ilbert Bill of 1883, where Viceroy Ripon tried to allow Indian judges and magistrates to try British subjects. Kipling, writing for the Civil and Military Gazette, initially wrote approvingly of the change only to face withering ostracism at the Punjab Officers’ Club; in letters and in his memoir Something of Myself, Kipling reflected that it was this experience that forced him to become an “Anglo-Indian” with the strong racial ideology that usually entailed, rather than merely an unattached young reporter free in India with a penchant for nocturnal visits to the “Lal Bazaar” (i.e., the red-light district), and who occasionally experimented with opium in these early years.

Though a growing number of critics and biographers have explored the formative role of Kipling’s years as a journalist in India, few have looked closely at his specific essays and journalist output from the period, or situated them in a detailed account of the life and culture of Punjab that existed beyond the Kiplings (and yes, there was more to Lahore in the 1880s than just the Kipling family). The goal is not to fixate solely on the Kipling family but to use the Kiplings of Lahore as a starting point for a broader exploration of the way colonialism was changing Indian life in Punjab in the 1880s and ‘90s. I am interested in the status of religion and ideas of racial identity as they were interpreted by the students and Indian faculty members at Lockwood’s school of art, as well as at the newly founded University of the Punjab in Lahore (some of these Indian students and professors are in fact mentioned by name in both Lockwood’s and Rudyard’s respective writings, and one aspect of my research will entail exploring whether any of these figures have their own archives).

See my research-in-progress: In the Library.

This project is supported by a grant from Lehigh's Center for Global Islamic Studies. 

Review: "A Night in London" by Sajjad Zaheer

A little while ago I did a blog post on Ahmed Ali, one of the leading lights of the Progressive Wrtiters Movement in India in the 1930s. At the time I mentioned that the key collection of that period, Angare (1932), had never been translated. (I later learned that an Urdu literature scholar has done a full translation, but there may be rights problems that are preventing it from actually being published.)

[Update: Snehal Shingavi's translation is out.]

Angare may remain unavailable in English, but a major missing piece of the puzzle has been published in the form of Bilal Hashmi's translation of Sajjad Zaheer's 1936 (published 1938) Urdu language novel, A Night in London.

This was a novel Zaheer wrote during a period of about two years that he lived in London -- after the banning of Angare, but before the Progressive Writers' Association was formally started in India in 1937-1938. By the time he published it, in 1938, he had become a full-fledged activist whose approach to literature was fully politicized, and as a result this novel about Indian student life in London in the 1930s was downplayed and effectively disavowed even at the moment of publication. In his own Foreword, Zaheer seemed to apologize somewhat for publishing a novel about Indian students, some of them quite wealthy, living a somewhat bohemian lifestyle in London:

It is one thing to sit down at the culmination of several years of study in Europe and, under the spell of private emotional conflict, to write a book of a hundred and fifty pages. But to have spent two-and-a-half years since then taking part in the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants in India, breathing in unison with millions of people and listening to the beating of their hearts, is entirely another matter.  

Today I could not write a book of this kind; nor would I consider it necessary to write it. (Sajjad Zaheer, from the Foreword to A Night in London)

Ironically, the very features that made it less interesting to Zaheer as he was beginning a moment of full-throated left activism might make A Night in London actually somewhat more interesting to readers today. The translator Bilal Hashmi notes in his brief and elegant afterword to the current volume:

The novella, which has since run into several editions, occupies a singular position in the history of Urdu literature. There is nothing quite like it, so far as I know, in Indian writing of roughly the same period, and that alone would seem to provide impetus enough for the work's belated translation into English. 

Still, a few words are in order here, a translator's apology, if you will, as to the limits and intention of the present undertaking. Ever the consummate strategist, Zaheer chose Urdu as the language for this, his most important literary labour. in doing so he parted company with Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and other expatriate contemporaries writing in European languages, largely on the grounds that a new Indian literature could only take shape from within the indigenous literary traditions of India. It was doubtless a political decision at the time (as it remains today), and one which kept the work at a remove from the same world literary marketplace into which it now stands the risk of being all but subsumed. 

I would add that A Night in London is actually a much better instance of ambitious Indian writing from the 1930s than are the books by Rao and Anand that have been so often mentioned by transnational modernism scholars in recent years (and in my view we shouldn't even be talking about Anand's rather dubious late memoir, Conversations in Bloomsbury) . I have long argued that Anand's early novels are not, in fact, very good, either as Indian modernist texts or as contributions to a conversation on issues of caste and colonialism that were active in the Gandhian movement. Admittedly, Zaheer is right in his Foreword to acknowledge that A Night in London is somewhat removed from the ground of Indian politics, but most readers today will nevertheless likely recognize it as a politically engaged work of fiction, which also happens to deploy several of the techniques of the modernist, stream-of-consciousness novel (including parallel, disjunctive plots, and a temporally constricted frame reminiscent of Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses).

So I want my colleagues in Modernist studies to read this translation, ASAP, and rethink how we have been talking about South Asian modernism, preferably to add a greater awareness of Urdu writing like Zaheer's.  Hashmi makes a somewhat similar point in his afterword:

Zaheer's novella was written with as much a nod to the 'socialist realist' Aragon of Le Monde reel (with whom the author rubbed shoulders in Paris), as to English literature's canonical modernists, Joyce and Woolf. It is widely regarded as the first major work of Urdu literature to employ the stream-of-consciousness technique, and that too with an expressly anti-colonial slant, far more radical, at least in that one respect, than anything that had until then emerged from within the Bloomsbury circle. [...] Zaheer was a committed realist, and yet with this work he was on the verge of creating, in tandem with other non-European writers of his generation, something radically new-- a modernism against modernism. 

I think this is exactly right. One of the ironies of Zaheer's career is that the accomplishment for which he is best known, the founding and propagation of the Progressive Writers' Association in Lucknow -- which, to be clear, was a monumental accomplishment -- seems to run counter to the spirit and intention of his most significant literary accomplishment (this novel).

A nice thing about Hashmi's translation is that the supplementary materials allow it to be effectively self-contained, rendering it a perfect teaching tool. Alongside the Afterword from Hashmi himself, there is a highly accessible and informative essay by Carlo Coppola summarizing Zaheer's life and work, and an excerpt from Zaheer's longer memoir, Roshnai, focusing on the period of his life during which he wrote this novel.  (Oh and did I mention it's short? A Night in London itself is just about 130 pages.)

* * *

I should also mention that a pretty substantial excerpt of the novel had earlier been translated by Ralph Russell for the Annual of Urdu Studies (AUS). Those excerpts can be found here. From the chapters excerpted you can get an idea of the themes of Zaheer's novel, but in fact you probably do need the whole novel to understand the continuities in the plot or the relationships between the various characters. So I would suggest again that people interested in this subject pick up A Night in London.

Teaching Notes: Transatlantic Modernism

This spring I taught a new graduate course at Lehigh on Transatlantic Modernism. 

As a bit of back-story: Several Ph.D. students I have worked with in recent years have expressed interest in defining their Modernism reading and teaching fields along transatlantic lines, but neither my colleague Seth Moglen (who does American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance) nor I (generally w/ British modernism and postcolonial literature) had looked closely at the historical premises of this. Nor had anyone taught a course with a specifically transatlantic focus.

That resistance to Transatlanticism in English literary studies comes from some deep-seated professional biases. Transnational research projects have become increasingly encouraged and common in literary studies in recent years, but generally speaking regional and period grounding has remained pretty much constant: for the purposes of the academic job market, you are still either an Americanist or a British literature person. One incidental goal of teaching this particular course was to test out whether a transatlantic approach to the writing of this period is in fact intellectually coherent -- rather than simply convenient for students aiming to pitch themselves broadly.

So my query going into this course was: does the "transatlantic" designation -- equal parts British and American -- actually fit modernism as I would like to see it defined? Many readers will be familiar with the transatlantic careers of major American figures such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Nella Larsen. Here I wanted to cross-reference these American writers' approaches to England and Europe against several key British writers who ended up as expatriates in the United States, most prominently D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, and W.H. Auden. The hypothesis is that modernism unfolded in the 1910s and 20s as a singular, transnational literary movement not seriously hampered by the vast distance between the two ends of the Atlantic Ocean.

The conceptual hypothesis might have major pedagogical implications: is it perhaps time for English literary studies to dispense with the traditional segregation of "British" and "American" writing from this period? Despite the major changes in literary methodology that have occurred over the past few decades – the rise of new modes of literary theory, and new sensitivity to issues of social justice and gendered and racial inclusiveness – for the most part, American and British literatures are today thought of and taught as separate from one another. While a certain amount of overlap is acknowledged (writers like T.S. Eliot are generally taught in courses on both British and American modernism), the idea that modernism in English might have been effectively a single event occurring nearly simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic hasn’t really hit home yet.

As I was designing the course, I was especially interested in focusing on the social networks, friendships and literary magazines that linked the various writers to one another. Who travelled where, when? What was everyone reading? In many cases writers who were living in Paris or London published their work in American journals. An American magazine called Little Review, for instance, was the first to publish Joyce’s Ulysses; it was also the defendant in the first obscenity trial against the novel. Similarly, the American magazine Others was the first to publish the provocative early poems of British writer Mina Loy.

I have been interested in whether it's possible that the changing dynamics of transatlantic travel and communication may have played a role in helping modernism play out as it did. Since the advent of faster and larger steamships starting in the 1870s and 80s, transatlantic travel had become considerably more common and manageable. Henry Adams has a great line about boarding a new transatlantic steamer called the Teutonic (on the Cunard / White Star Line) in 1892:

The voyage was less trying than I expected. The ship was so big and so fast, and relatively so comfortable, that as I lay in my stateroom and looked out of my windows on the storm, I felt a little wonder whether this world were the same that I lived in thirty years ago. In all my wanderings this is the first time I have had the sensation. All the rest of the world seems more or less what it was, and Europe is less changed than any of the rest; but the big Atlantic steamer is a whacker. (Henry Adams, cited in Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships)

By the 1910s, of course, with the advent of the HMS Mauretania and the HMS Lusitania, the experience was even better and faster than it was in 1892. One cannot help but think that the fact that it took less than a week to cross the Atlantic in person -- not to mention the ease of circulating and disseminating both magazines and books -- may have had ripple effects, and helped to allow new aesthetic styles and ideas to proliferate with new speed in the early 1910s in particular. Could the HMS Mauretania been one of the hidden historical "whackers" that helped put transatlantic modernism in motion? (One might also mention the role of transatlantic telegraph cables, though by the 1910s these were nothing new.)


(More after the break.)

New Course Idea: Writing For the Internet

I am trying to put together a new course, called "Writing For the Internet." The idea would be to teach it in Spring 2013. I haven't done anything quite like this, and I am curious to hear feedback from readers, as well as any personal experiences from others who have taught courses along these lines. 

New Course Idea: "Writing For the Internet" 

In their future professional lives our students will likely do more and more writing in an internet context. Their paths may be different – some may be involved in journalism, others in creative work, and quite a few may fall into writing for the internet as an accidental part of jobs that may be technically focused on something else. Many of the conventions of the traditional “5 paragraph” paper assignment will remain important in this new world: students will continue to need to know how to establish a sense of topic and put forward a thesis, and how to offer evidentiary support for that thesis. But in some ways the internet is a very different environment, with its own context-specific writing conventions.

In part this proposed course will be structured as a conventional writing course. But unlike traditional writing courses that stress a divide between creative, personal, journalistic, and expository work, here students will be encouraged to do work that might blur the line between those different modes of writing. There will be an emphasis on rhetorical persuasion and argument, and revision will play an important part in the writing process -- but we are adding a focus on audience and readership, as well as the mode of publication.

Here are a few premises of the course: 

1. Writers on the internet have to think about how to grab and hold the attention of casual readers as well as how to integrate links and images into their work.  

• These used to be thought of in the context of publishing, but increasingly, with self-publishing venues proliferating and a number of media organizations requiring elements of web production as well as the drafting of text, it may be that publishing and writing are no longer truly separable.

• Another issue is length and attention-span with internet readers. While the hyper-compression of Twitter leads to arguments sometimes conducted in non-ideal situations, even writing formats
  that aren’t length-restricted have to deal with internet readers’ attention spans. 

• As a result, people writing on the internet,
even as non-journalists, have to learn some of the basics of journalistic writing – how to find a catchy but telling title, how to use text boxes to present overviews or pull quotes (along the lines of what you see in newspapers), and how to manipulate images (this is of course especially important in new image-centric writing formats like Tumblr). Writing on the internet one also does things that are very much frowned upon in conventional essay-writing, such as using bold face and italics for emphasis.

• The course I’m thinking of will likely use examples of people using new writing modes really effectively. Lately I’ve been particularly impressed by the way the novelist Teju Cole has been using Twitter to make complex kinds of arguments, often in serial & connected Tweets. These are then compiled by professional journalists. Teju was recently interviewed on NPR regarding his innovative Tweeting. The larger point is to show that while these new forms may have certain conventions that participants are expected to follow, in fact inventive writers might find ways to push the envelope of what can be accomplished using the formats like Twitter or Facebook. (See: http://bit.ly/JFyVN5)

• Another issue is of course the self-promotion element of writing on the internet.  Traditional writing and publishing maintained a pretty strict division between the labor of writing and publicity and attention. But increasingly writers on the internet find their own audiences and create their own markets – and use success in getting attention as a segue to formal (and paid) publication. Besides simply “announcing” oneself, one can use strategies such as semantic tagging and metadata to maximize search engine attention (not quite the same as Search Engine Optimization, but we’ll probably read some background material on what that is in this unit as well – especially since it’s become such an important part of how sites like the Huffington Post earn their money).

•  I may ask students to start a series of blogs on topics that they choose (perhaps in groups of 2 or 3), or I may try and all ask them to write on a given topic of general interest. (One option might indeed be to write about and comment on issues in the news involving writing on the internet – there are always stories out about something Twitter is doing, something Facebook is doing, etc. Not to mention issues like the recent lawsuit (now dismissed) against the Huffington Post, initiated by a group of disgruntled bloggers.)

2. Writers on the internet have to navigate complex issues related to citation, borrowing, and sharing. The standard distinction between blockquotes and short citations, the approach to footnoting, and the construction of Bibliographies can follow a very different pattern on the internet. As in other classes that entail (or at least, allow) some measure of research online, students have to learn to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of materials they find on the web. They also have to learn to produce their own, authoritative seeming materials.

3. Above all, the internet is an environment where writers have to learn how to actively seek out and find their readers, through social networking sites, blogs, forums, and Twitter. The reader is not simply "there" as a captive audience anymore.

4. One component of this course will entail classifying the forms of online writing, including email, blogs and message boards, formal journalism, wikis, and scholarly publications. Students will learn the conventions of the different online writing genres and learn to contribute to them on their own. Students will contribute to a course blog engaging with current events, and author or significantly edit a Wiki around a chosen topic or area of knowledge.

5. We'll also have a component entailing a more conceptual consideration of issues such as the ethics of online writing and the boundary between private and public. What is it fair to share about the people we know in real life? How to effectively navigate privacy controls to choose the right forums for particular kinds of sharing in the evolving social networking internet landscape? Here, too, there has been much discussion in recent months. One bit of required reading for this unit would have to be Ian Parker's essay in the New Yorker about Dharun Ravi and Tyler Clementi. The issue of privacy in social networks was one of the key issues in that case.

UPDATE: 


From friends on Facebook, I've received tips regarding using the work of Edward Tufte, Cathy Davidson, and Clay Shirky in this course. These all seem like great suggestions.

Reflecting on Sepia Mutiny, South Asia and South Asian Americans

So, Sepia Mutiny is shutting down.

At its height, from 2004 to about 2009 or so, I think it was the most active South Asian diaspora-oriented forum on the web. Posts on everything from M.I.A. to Bobby Jindal to interracial dating would routinely draw 200, 300, sometimes even 1000 comments. And while some of those comments were less than thrilling, we as bloggers could always count on interesting new voices to show up in between. Blogging on Sepia Mutiny was addictive for me (and I think not just me) during those years in large part because it was impossible not to be excited to encounter so many different perspectives and ideas.

Sepia Mutiny was always somewhat divided over its function and focus. On the one hand, the directive from Abhi and the other founders was quite clear: the point was to create a space for a South Asian American perspective. The "South Asian" part was important and essential (and we had many fights, mainly with skeptical readers, about whether it wasn't after all just an "Indian American" blog). Also important was the "American" part of the equation; Sepia Mutiny was never intended to be an "Indian subcontinent" forum.

This policy of not focusing on South Asia itself was, however, always a challenge for me, since I have a deep personal and professional interest in what is happening in the subcontinent itself in terms of politics, culture, the media, and of course literature. And this past decade has been a really interesting one on all those fronts, from the debates over communalism and secularism (and we had many good arguments about those issues in the comments), to the rapid changes in the style of commercial Hindi cinema, to the debates about economic trends like outsourcing and globalization. Despite the blog's stated policy of focusing exclusively on the diaspora, many of my colleagues at Sepia Mutiny joined me in posting frequently on these types of issues, leading to some very rich discussions. As I see it, it was a policy honored more in the breach than in the observance, and that's a good thing.

Another source of tension, not within the circle of Sepia Mutiny bloggers, but rather between bloggers and readers, was around generational issues. All of the founders of the blog were second generation Indian Americans (later Bangladeshi American, Pakistani American, and Sri Lankan American contributors would also join). However, many, if not most of the readership during the years I was involved seemed to consist of first generation immigrants (and many 1.5 generation folks -- people who immigrated between age 5 and 15). This reflects the demographics of the South Asian American population -- there are more immigrants than second or third generation South Asian Americans in the United States -- and the fact that these readers were all interested in hearing about and talking about the same stuff underlines the commonalities between different generations of immigrants. Recent immigrants from South Asia might be interested in reading my post in 2005 about Katrina Kaif, but they might also be interested in hearing about Kal Penn or Padma Lakshmi. I think both bloggers and readers evolved quite a bit on this kind of issue over the years. In the beginning, first and second generation commenters used to make fun of each other as ("FOBs" or "ABCDs", respectively), but somewhere along the line a more respectful and intelligent kind of conversation started to occur. The first generation scorn for ABCDs speaking Hindi badly started to lose its edge, while the second-generation's dislike of the "awkward immigrant" stigma also evolved. In short, I think we all grew up, and started to appreciate and understand one another better.

My dream would have been a half diasporic, half "home" oriented blog; it was very nearly there for a little while. Luckily, there are fantastic new, highly professionalized blogs hosted by the New York Times (India Ink) and the Wall Street Journal, that provide much of what used to be my Sepia Mutiny fix. I read them every day. And I get just a little smidgeon of what was once the excitement of the Sepia Mutiny comments on venues like Twitter (not so much, these days, from Facebook).

Finally, I should say that while the new social networking venues are helping to carry on the kinds of conversations that went on at Sepia Mutiny, they are a little lacking on some respects. For one thing, both Facebook and Twitter require super-compressed conversations. While it's true we may have been a bit too long-winded in some blog posts over the years, I think there really is value in spelling out an idea or a perspective at some length, and then giving readers as much space as they want or need to discuss it with you. I don't think I have ever changed my mind based on a discussion I had with someone on Twitter. But I did, often, in response to discussions on Sepia Mutiny.

I am not sure what the solution is. There's no question that social networking is here to stay, but maybe as that ecosystem continues to evolve we can again find a space for long-form (but still immediate, and unfiltered) discussions of the issues that are on our minds.

***


I was a contributor at Sepia Mutiny for about 5 of its 8 years, and a full-fledged blogger for four of them (2006-2010). That period saw the birth of my first child (we now have two!), a period of severe illness in fall 2007, the publication of my book in early 2007, and the dramatic and sometimes difficult experience of going through tenure in 2007 and 2008. There was a Sepia Mutiny post (by Ennis), celebrating the birth of my son in 2006, and I relied quite a bit on the Sepia Mutiny community during the fall of 2007, when I was home sick. I also used the space to talk a bit about the ideas in my book when it came out in the spring of 2007. All of this meant quite a lot to me; my blogging was an extension of who I was in a very personal way during this time period.

I can link four academic articles to my blogging, and three of those four relate to Sepia Mutiny. The most directly relevant is an essay I wrote on Jhumpa Lahiri and the problem of naming of the "South Asian" diaspora. (I also have an essay out on Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, which had its origins in a Sepia Mutiny post about the pluralistic nature of the Ramayana; an essay on Tagore's travel writing, which started as a Sepia Mutiny blog post; and finally, a more theoretical post on blogging pseudonyms and the changing nature of authorship.)

The years 2007-2010, when I wrote and published those essays -- while also blogging quite frequently at Sepia Mutiny -- were very productive ones for me in terms of scholarly productivity. At times I have thought that I was hurting my career as a scholar by blogging too much (and there's no question that the content of some of my public statements and interventions may have harmed me, especially during the 'Sonal Shah' debate). But considering that my academic writing has actually slowed down a fair bit since I left off regular blogging in 2010, I'm not so sure about the "distraction" argument against blogging. It may be that the daily regimen of composing in public is actually conducive to better discipline in academic writing, even if it means one is sometimes distracted by the latest outrageous comment from "MoorNam."

You can see a collection of my Sepia Mutiny posts here: http://sepiamutiny.com/blog/author/author11/

Speaker at Lehigh Today

I've helped organize this lecture:

Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Cosmopolitanism, Women and War: 

From Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

Wednesday February 15 4pm Scheler Family Humanities Forum (Linderman 200)

Me on Manto: Interview in "Viewpoint"

Qaisar Abbas of UNT interviewed me on Sa'adat Hasan Manto by email for a magazine he writes for called "Viewpoint." You can see the interview here.  Also see a new essay on Manto by the great Tariq Ali here. There are a number of other essays in the special issue on Manto, which I haven't read yet. The magazine in general is at:

http://www.viewpointonline.net

Probably the most arguable (interesting?) section of the interview might be this one:

Manto was tried in India and Pakistan for “obscenity” as he used images of women as sex object and prostitute in several of his short stories. How would you compare obscenity and portraying sex as a social reality in literature? Who defines standards of pornography and sex in fine arts and literature in South Asia?

Manto wrote about prostitution because it was a part of life in his era. Once he was asked this same question, and he had the following rejoinder: 

“If any mention of a prostitute is obscene then her existence too is obscene. If any mention of her is prohibited, then her profession too should be prohibited. Do away with the prostitute; reference to her would vanish by itself.” (via Harish Narang)

I do not think Manto was particularly obsessed with prostitution. It might be more accurate to say that he was part of a broader movement in Modern literature to depict sexuality more honestly and sincerely than earlier generations had done, and writing stories with characters who were prostitutes was one way for him to do that. Even within Urdu and Hindi literature, Manto was not the only one to push the boundary with regards to explicit sexuality in his writing. The first wave of Progressive Writers, emerging from the Angarey group, also did this. One infamous story by Sajjad Zaheer, for instance, was called “Vision of Paradise” (Jannat ki Basharat) which featured a Maulvi who begins to have erotic dreams while he intends to stay up late praying. The story was controversial at the time because it was seen as blasphemous, and reading it today there’s no doubt that Zaheer intended to be provocative regarding religious piety. But it is no less provocative because of its use of explicit sexuality.

Alongside the Angarey group, Premchand himself was often more direct about matters of sexuality than many people realize. His famous 1936 novel Godaan, for instance, features a cross-caste sexual relationship described quite frankly – though it’s by no means pornographic. Finally, it should be noted that Manto’s friend and rival, Ismat Chughtai, also pushed the line regarding the depiction of sexuality.

That said, there’s no question that Manto takes things a step further. A story like “Bu” (Odour) is significantly more explicit in its depiction of a random sexual encounter than anything written by Zaheer or Chughtai. As a side note, this story, which is one of Manto’s most infamous ones, is not actually about prostitution, but rather a middle-class man’s encounter with a poor woman (a Marathi “Ghatin”) working as a laborer. Other stories do deal directly with prostitution, but often with a focus on the hypocrisy and weakness of men. Manto’s prostitutes are often honest and even noble individuals – trying to survive in a society that treats the exploitation of women’s bodies as merely another kind of financial transaction. 

On the question of who sets the standards for obscenity. Here I think there’s no question that by the standards of his time, some of Manto’s stories could be found to be “obscene.” As is well-known, he was tried for obscenity six times during his career, some by the British Indian government before 1947, and some by the independent government of Pakistan. I certainly oppose the censorship, but I think Manto knew what he was doing in writing stories like “Bu,” and I don’t think he or his career suffered greatly because he got in trouble for it; if anything, it may have gotten him more attention and thus helped his career in some ways. That said, with the sexual elements in “Khol Do!” or “Thanda Ghosht,” I do feel these are worth defending, since Manto is referencing sexual violence not for titillation but to make an important ethical point. 

Notes on "Photo-Wallahs" (1992)

My friend Kate Pourshariati recently organized a screening of the documentary film Photo-Wallahs (1992) at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. She invited me to briefly introduce the film and moderate a discussion. Below is a slightly revised version of my notes from the event.

David and Judith MacDougall have been making documentary films since the late 1960s, and they’ve made films on people from numerous regions, from Africa, to Italy, to Australia, to India. Besides this film, they’ve done several other documentaries based in India, including Doon School Chronicles, on the elite boarding school in Dehra Dun, and Gandhi’s Children, focusing on slum children in Delhi. (Many of their documentaries are made collaboratively, but they have sometimes also worked on their own. Doon School Chronicles has David McDougall’s name on it exclusively, while a recent film, Diyas, was directed exclusively by Judith McDougall.)  In addition to making films, David MacDougall has written a fair amount about film and issues related to visual anthropology over the years, including two books, Transcultural Cinema and The Corporeal Image. 

Photo-Wallahs is a film about the culture of photography in the famous hill station of Mussoorie, with some scenes filmed in Dehra Dun. The method of the documentary is “observational,” which is to say there’s no background narration from the film-makers, and the audience has to do the work of putting together the individual pieces and themes themselves. The filmmakers focus on two different kinds of professional photography, 1) tourism photography, which involves middle-class tourists paying to be photographed dressed up in fanciful costumes with the Mussoorie hills in the background; and 2) more conventional studio photography, such as is used in matrimonial ads and wedding pictures. They also have brief sections involving people who are not photographers, including a segment with Sita Devi of Kapurthala (who was photographed by the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton in England in the 1930s), as well as a segment with the Indian writer Ruskin Bond, reading from his story “The Photograph.”

On "The Essential Tagore"

Just a quick note to say Happy New Year, and announce that I have a medium-length essay reviewing the new Harvard UP anthology of Tagore, The Essential Tagore.

The essay is up at Open Letters Monthly, and you can read it here.

Besides the usual reviewing and synopsis of Tagore's life and career I make a particular kind of argument regarding how I think Tagore should be read -- as someone who used three literary voices, (1) that of a lyric poet, (2) novelistic realism, and (3) satire. Some of his most interesting stories, poems, and plays are the ones where he shifts voices within the work, or uses more than one voice. The story "The Broken Nest" is one such example.  I also talk about a particular poem by Tagore called "The Poet," which isn't widely cited in English. And finally, I look briefly at one of the satirical Tagore plays included in the anthology, "The Kindgom of Cards."

Goa Think Fest: a View from Afar

A few months after a tumultuous (but nevertheless quite glamorous) Jaipur Literature Festival, there has been another major global-oriented event in India, the Goa Think Fest, which took place this past weekend. 

The ThinkFest is organized by editors of Tehelka (Tarun Tejpal and Shoma Choudhury) as well as Newsweek -- and one of the bold face names to speak at the event was none other than Tina Brown herself. Also on the roster were William Dalrymple (speaking on Afghanistan), the venerable Pakistani journalist Pervez Hoodbhoy ("Seven Ways to Rescue Pakistan"), psychoanalytic theorists Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandy, authors Shashi Tharoor and Hari Kunzru (the latter has a new book out), anti-corruption activists Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal (though apparently Anna Hazare did not end up showing up), hipster actor Abhay Deol and hipster filmmakers Anurag Kashyap and Dibaker Banerjee ("Movies Bollywood is Too Scared to Make"), architect Frank Gehry (!), oncologist and cancer writer Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee (who recently won a Pulitzer prize for his book on cancer), and Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif. 

First, the wow: seems like a great line-up of writers, intellectuals, and artists (I didn't mention all the musicians and visual artists who were also there) all in the same place for a weekend. I could do without Thomas Friedman and V.S. Naipaul, but I suppose there are others for whom these folks remain a big draw. 

I was hoping for an exciting Twitter feed related to the Think Fest (hashtags #goathinkfest and #thinkfest), but mostly what you see is a lot of famous and almost-famous people saying things like, "had a great time at #goathinkfest" "dancing to Kailash Kher at #goathinkfest", and so on. That said, I did come across one interesting thread via Twitter, a bit of drama behind the festival, starting with a critique of Tarun Tejpal and Tehelka by a "theater veteran" named Hartman de Souza in the Hindustan Times. Tarun Tejpal's subsequent defense of buying a property in Goa, his editorial policies at Tehelka as well as the choice of venue for the Think Fest, seemed mainly satisfactory to me, though I do want to know more about de Souza's claim that Tehelka might have shelved a story related to illegal mining in the state in order to secure some advantages from the state government related to the organizing of the Festival. (I should also mention that Hartman de Souza has a follow-up in response to Tejpal's response, at Kafila.)

In the absence of exciting chatter on Twitter, more conventional searches for headlines related to the festival turns up a story on NDTV, featuring Siddhartha Mukherjee talking about Steve Jobs' death. (As has been widely reported, Steve Jobs' decision to try an unorthodox/holistic treatment to his pancreatic cancer rather than immediate surgery may have turned what was originally a treatable diagnosis into a fatal one.) 

One good general summary of the event is up at the Daily Beast (only appropriate), by Lucas Wittman, while another (also appropriately) can be found at Tehelka.  There is a hint of snark in Manjula Lal's Tehelka piece pertaining to the hollowness and bombast of some of the speakers that I especially liked (cf. the comment on Aamir Khan and the silly quote from Shashi Tharoor suggesting that Delhi police officers report their daily activities on Twitter).

As a final note, I should add that Goa will soon also host the Goa Arts and Literature Festival (December 17-21). I would love to be there for that event  too -- many of the speakers there are people I would consider friends and colleagues -- but sadly I don't think it will be happening for me this year. Perhaps I will again be able to spy in from afar...

"Ulysses": A Couple of Documents Related to the Obscenity Trials

I am teaching "Ulysses" again this fall with undergraduates, roughly along the same lines that I described in a blog post I wrote after the last experience. It's still every bit as exhilarating and exhausting as it was three years ago.

This time I am paying a bit more attention to some of the legal history surrounding the novel, which as is well known was banned for obscenity in the United States in 1921, and unbanned in 1933. The immediate episode that provoked the ban was episode 13 ("Nausicaa"), which was printed in pieces by the journal The Little Review. The editors of that journal, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, were the ones prosecuted in the initial trial, after a lawyer in New York complained about it. That lawyer stated that his daughter had read and been shocked by "Nausicaa" after receiving The Little Review in the mail. The figure of the innocent daughter, "the young girl" reader who might be corrupted by Ulysses became a key rhetorical figure in the to-and-fro over the novel that followed.

1. The documents related to the original trial are not easy to come by online. The best essay I have seen on the subject is a Washington University Law Review essay by Stephen Gillers that describes the history of the trial (as well as its precedents) in great detail. The key discussion related to Ulysses begins around p. 250.

2. One document that is online, but not in a very good form, is Jane Heap's initial printed defense of the novel, and of the Nausicaa episode in particular, which she printed in The Little Review in the fall of 1920 (before the first trial was decided). That essay is called "Art and the Law," and it can be found in an Archive.org uncorrected scan of several issues of the magazine here.

I have gone through that scanned version and corrected the mistakes caused by OCR. Since the document is, I believe, out of copyright, I am posting the corrected version of the essay here as a service to any colleagues who might find it useful:

In Defense of A.K. Ramanujan's "300 Ramayanas"

About two weeks ago, Delhi University voted to remove A.K. Ramanujan's essay, "Three Hundred Ramayanas," from its curriculum.

For reference, the essay is available here. I consider it essential reading for anyone who wants to know about the complex textual history of the Ramayana. Though a right-wing Hindu organization called the ABVP has claimed that the essay is offensive to Hindus (and they led a violent protest against the essay in 2008), in fact the purpose of the essay is primarily scholarly -- it's an attempt to document the different versions of the Ramayana that have been passed down in different Indian languages. Since the Ramayana was for centuries transmitted orally rather than on paper, it's no surprise that there are variants in the story. In addition to describing the different versions, Ramanujan talks about the nature of textual transformation, and introduces terms that help us categorize different kinds of changes and shifts (some of which may be accidental, while others may be more "indexical" -- that is, intentionally inserted to make the text fit different cultural and historical contexts).

See The Hindu's interview with Romila Thapar on the issue here. Another thoughtful account of the controversy is here. Also, it's worth noting left-leaning faculty and students at DU did do a protest in defense of the essay in the curriculum this past week, an account of which can be found here. Maybe this episode isn't over yet?

For reference, I have talked about this issue on several occasions over the years. I attempted to provoke a discussion of "versions of the Ramayana" several years ago on Sepia Mutiny: here (another version of the discussion occurred here). (Admittedly, I didn't know a whole lot when I put up that post; I know a bit more about this issue now.) And more recently, I published an essay on Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues in South Asian Review, called "Animating a Postmodern Ramayana." That essay can be found here.

Follow-Up: "Brown" and "White"

The responses to my post on Nikki Haley a couple of days ago have been interesting The pushback makes me want to clarify some of my arguments a bit more, though I don't have any aspirations of actually "winning" the debate; in any case my own views on South Asians and the peculiar American concept of race are very much in flux these days, and I am still thinking it through.

There are two salient themes that seem to come up in the discussion that perhaps could be underlined:

1) The real long-term goal is to undermine "whiteness" as a kind of racial default or endpoint for both immigrant communities in American society and for the established racial minority (i.e., blacks or African Americans). In response to one of the comments on my original post, I suggested that perhaps where we are headed eventually, at least in the urban parts of the U.S. is towards a kind of post-"white" society, where the barriers will be much more class-based than racial, especially for people from immigrant backgrounds who don't have the familial experience of slavery and segregation in their past. The configuration of race has changed several times in American history (see books like "How the Irish Became White" and so on), and it can and will change again.

2) If we can't displace whiteness as a default, perhaps we can redefine it. For at least the past 50 years or so, being understood as "white" in the U.S. meant that you were of European origins (earlier it would have meant more strictly northern and western European origins). I think it may be the case that with the rise of someone like Haley, who is perceived by many South Carolinians as white despite her South Asian immigrant origins (which are widely known), that this kind of subversion may already have happened.

Below I'm just going to paste snippets and comments I've seen by others on the web that address these two ideas, with my own brief responses.

* *

On Facebook, a friend posted a comment that I thought summed up where I've been on this issue myself for the most part:

I want to believe that one can claim whiteness if one wants. Depending on who's doing the claiming, it could be the ultimate act of subversion against the hegemon, self-loathing assimilation, or somewhere in between. And if any group could get away with it, Indians are the ones with the privilege. After all, Bhagat Singh Thind attempted to gain citizenship by arguing that Indians are Caucasian - even though he lost his case. But looking at Republican Indians in politics, namely Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, it's hard for me to think they are up to anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves to the Republican establishment and their constituents. I say all of this as someone who was only dimly aware of being Indian until I went to college and UPenn's South Asian Student Association tried (unsuccessfully) to co-opt me. Yet, I've never once considered putting anything other than "Asian" in the race box (except for declining to answer when possible or writing in "human" on my census form).

I want to underline my friend's point about privilege. Many Indian Americans especially come from privileged backgrounds economically, and I think people who claim a "People of Color" solidarity amongst East and South Asians, Latinos, and blacks have to recognize this point. I may at times feel a "person of color" solidarity with poor blacks in America, but the solidarity is not shared: to them I inevitably sound a lot more like a white liberal when it comes to social and economic issues, even if I don't look like one.

That said, I don't dispute that Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley had to work hard to "Americanize" (one could also say deracinate) themselves in order to succeed in politics. On Sepia Mutiny over the years we had many (too many) discussions about whether Bobby Jindal would have had a prayer (loaded term!) of a chance in Louisiana if he had either run as "Piyush" rather than Bobby, or hadn't been a Catholic convert. (The answer is clearly "no, he would not have had a chance") The same probably holds for Haley if she were to have run as "Randhawa," or with a turbaned Sikh husband rather than her actual husband, Michael Haley.

* *

At the Volokh Conspiracy there have been a pair of posts on this subject, and many interesting comments (these predate my own post). One salient comment by a commenter ran as follows:

[A]llow a white Southerner to point out something about casual use of the word “white”: sometimes it just means “not black”. Meaning, believe it or not, that in common usage, a school (or gathering, or club, or church, or whatever) in the South that includes no black people is “all-white”. This is true even when there are, for instance, people of Korean or Indian ancestry in said group. Whether this is anthropologically correct, or PC, or even nice is beside the point. It’s just one of the common, casual usages. (link)

I have seen this in other cases, and not just in the South. I even have to admit that I've done something like this myself on occasion. For example, at one point I was teaching a class on a topic in postcolonial literature, with something like 12 white students, two (East) Asian American students, and one African American student. To a colleague I remember noting, "with the exception of **** [the African American student], all the students in my poco class this spring are white!" Somehow in the course of that conversation I unconsciously turned the two Asian American women in that class, with Christian first names, into white students.

If you read the many comments on that post at Volokh, you'll see that many other people also seem to unconsciously do this at times, even though they might later note the seeming "mistake." The question I want people who have disagreed with my previous post to address is: what might it tell us about the definition of "race" in American society that so many people are doing this?

To my eye, it suggests that second/third generation Asian Americans in particular are losing their "otherness" in certain contexts and social milieux. When it comes to college affirmative action policies, Asians have long since not counted as "minorities," and the spaces where that is true will only continue to expand.

(Also see this post from Volokh in 2008: "How the Asians became White." There the focus is on a study of doctors in California; Asians and whites are counted on one side, while blacks and Latinos are counted on the other.)

* *
Samhita at Feministing wrote quite an extensive post on this issue, responding to me and taking up some points made by Taz at Sepia Mutiny. Here is one of Samita's key points:

But, at the end of the day, it is not about what we say we are–race is a structural experience, as much as it is an interpersonal one, if not more so. Having access to white culture and more money doesn’t make you white, as many sociologists have found. Haley can self-identify as white, but she has had the lived experience of a person who is not white and as a result, will never be recognized as white or have access to “whiteness,” in the political sense of the word, even if some people once in a while mistake her for white on the street.

But I actually do think Haley has had the experience of being effectively "white," in part because of the peculiar racial configuration that holds sway in the American south (see the comment from Volokh I posted above), but also increasingly in other parts of the U.S. And I mean that she has been recognized as such by the dominant/white mainstream, not simply that she decided to call herself white on a lark, despite what everyone else around her thinks.

The fact that this is so is not necessarily a cause to celebrate; if anything, the comment I quoted above from Volokh suggests that while the definition of "white" may be broadening, it is still based on an opposition to (and sometimes exclusion of) "black." And that is real problem we have to address, one way or the other.

Nikki Haley, Race, and the U.S. Census

This is the kind of post I once would have written on Sepia Mutiny, with the full knowledge that it would have produced a firestorm of controversy. One of my former colleagues over there did cover the story, but as you can see the reaction is pretty much predictable: let's just call her an Uncle Tom because she's pretending to be white (to be fair, the comments do challenge the premise of the post in some interesting ways).

Here I wanted to push past the basic framework that people have for thinking about this issue and suggest that 1) Census and drivers' license racial categories help provoke this problem, since "East Indian" or "South Asian" is not a widely recognized racial category, leaving many people confused; and 2) it would not in any case necessarily be a "racial" sell-out for Haley to identify as white given her economic background, acculturation and appearance. She may just be recording what many other people are already thinking.

* * *

1. Generalized confusion over racial and ethnic categories

As many readers will have seen, it recently came out that Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina had her race listed as "white" on her 2000 voter registration card. The most detailed version of the story I've seen is from USA Today, which reveals that in large part this story has been generated by the Democratic party of South Carolina to try and embarrass the Governor:

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian said the 2001 document the party unearthed shows the 39-year-old Haley plays on her race for political convenience.
"She can't even tell the truth about her racial heritage," Harpootlian said.

Haley spokesman Trey Walker said the governor's office did not plan to respond to the Democrats. State Republican Party Executive Director Matt Moore called Harpootlian's criticism "just more theatrics and that's all there is to it."

Haley's 2001 voter registration application was derived from information already on her driver's license.

It was not clear when that information may have been provided, or what options were even available on the form for racial identifiers when it was given.

South Carolina's current driver's license application asks people to identify their race as white, black, Hispanic, Asian or Indian, according to instructions for the form. It doesn't specify whether the description "Indian" refers to someone who is American Indian or of Asian Indian heritage, but it traditionally refers to Native American on government forms. (link)

Of course, "Indian" in South Carolina means Native American, so the only option for Haley other than White or Black is Asian. I myself would put down "Asian" in Haley's shoes, but I think that Indian Americans could be forgiven for not feeling comfortable with that category, since many people continue to understand "Asian" to refer only to East and Southeast Asians.

I posted earlier on the ongoing and broad-ranging confusion in the way government agencies classify different communities by race and ethnicity. The U.S. census racial categories have long been a source of confusion for many immigrant groups in particular. While the approach to race and ethnicity involving Hispanic/Latino people is now impressively nuanced and complex, the approach to immigrants from other parts of the world remains confusing and haphazard. "Asian Indian" is now a category you can check, but the "Other Asian" category seems to invite Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans to check that box despite the obvious connections between the different nations of the Indian subcontinent.

The question of course is what the U.S. government plans to do with "racial" information other than simply record it (as I understand it in countries like France the government does not keep official tallies of its racial and ethnic minorities for fear of encouraging discrimination). While there is an affirmative action argument -- it's important to know whether all members of society are getting proportionate access to government services -- it's not clear to me that Indians and Pakistanis would want or expect to be treated differently by a government agency based on their ethnic/racial background. I maintain that it would be far more sensible to have a broader category called "South Asian" that would include everyone deriving from the Indian subcontinent; other sensible categories would be "East Asian" and "Southeast Asian."

A second issue pertains more specifically to Sikhs and the "Sikh American" community. Many Sikhs I know in the U.S. do not identify strongly as "Indian American." Some who dis-identify as Indian come from families with strong separatist bents, going back to the "Khalistani" days of the 1980s. Others may have more muted ideological investments (i.e., they do not actively support the creation of a separate Sikh state of "Khalistan"), but still may have been raised in environments where Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims did not mingle much (this diasporic separatism is itself a legacy of the tensions in India from the 1980s). I do not know much about the Randhawa family in South Carolina, but certainly many of the Sikh families I knew when I lived in North Carolina seemed to fit this bill quite well; they had little connection to Punjabi Hindus and virtually no social connection to non-Punjabi speaking Indians. These are Sikhs that identify more strongly as "Sikh American" than as "Indian American"; I doubt that this applies to Haley herself because she has converted to Christianity, but it could, for some Sikhs, potentially add to the confusion at least regarding whether to check the box for "Indian" or "Asian Indian." Indian is a nationality; "South Asian" may be defined as a "race," depending on how we define race. In any case, "South Asian" was not one of the choices available to Governor Haley.

Given all this confusion, I think it may be wise not to jump to conclusions regarding the racial identification on Nikki Haley's voter registration card.

(I should also point out that Nikki Haley is far from the only one to have this confusion. Amongst second generation South Asian Americans, a full 25% of them checked "white" on the 1990 census, while 5% checked "black".)

2. Identifying as "White"

When Italians, Greeks, and Eastern European Jews started immigrating to the U.S. en masse in the early 20th century, they were not seen by other Americans originating from Northern and Western European countries as "white," at least not white in the same way they saw themselves as white. The "ethnic difference" of these immigrants was visible and it presented a clear social barrier.

Over time, of course, those groups were assimilated, and today Italian Americans, Irish Americans, and Ashkenazi Jews who have a strong sense of identification with their families' countries of origin are seen as "white ethnics." Ethnicity is now seen as a barrier that can be easily crossed and lose its significance over time, while "race" is reserved to describe visibly different minority groups.

The question I often have for South Asian Americans, especially those who come from affluent backgrounds and whose acculturation is largely to Euro-American ("white") norms, is whether they really think they are so going to be very different from white ethnic communities down the road.

Isn't it fair that some South Asian Americans with little connection to South Asian culture or language would see themselves (and be seen as) "white" by others in their communities? Isn't it possible to be of South Asian origin and "white" at the same time?

To be clear, I myself don't describe myself as white. I just don't see why other South Asians shouldn't be allowed to do so if they have a strong identification with Euro-American cultural norms and others in the community accept it. To make this identification doesn't even require that you ignore or hide your family background; but it seems inevitable that for a significant number of South Asian Americans going forward their ethnic identity will play for them rather the same role it does for Italian Americans -- it's in your name, and maybe visible in your complexion (though with the growth of intermarriage this too may fade), but it doesn't necessarily pose any kind of other meaningful social barrier.

I understand that in the African American community this kind of thinking is deeply frowned upon, since it has a history going back to the Jim Crow era -- the old legacy of "passing" to avoid racial discrimination, which in many cases prevented true solidarity from taking hold. Even identifying as "multiracial" as Tiger Woods did many years ago is controversial along those lines: you are either with us in struggle ("black" as a term suggesting a racial identity that is always political), or you are not.

But in fact South Asian American immigrants do not share that history; many of us have never experienced that kind of discrimination, and it's unclear to me what political or ideological power comes with identifying as "Asian," as Nikki Haley presumably should have done to avoid the censure of the Democratic party in her home state.

I personally do feel a sense of political solidarity with other "brown" and "Desi" people owing to who I am and my personal cultural values and orientation. But I also know plenty of South Asian Americans for whom this is not really the case, and I'm not at all invested in policing whether they or their children see themselves as ethnically "white" or "South Asian," since it seems that anyway most people are not clear what these categories really mean.

UPDATE:

See this interesting discussion at Brownpundits.

Race and the U.S. Census -- from April 2010

I wrote this in April 2010, and tried to get it published without success as an Op-Ed. Printing it now in response to a debate some friends are having regarding race and the census. I may have a follow-up post on it soon.

More than sixty years ago, my grandparents left their home in a village in Pakistan, packed all their belongings in an ox-cart, and walked on foot for hundreds of miles – along with millions of other Sikhs and Hindus – across the border to a newly independent nation: India. Millions of Muslims from the other side of the border were going in the opposite direction, settling in Pakistan, where the immigrants from India are to this day identified by other Pakistanis as “Mohajirs” (“Migrants”), held to be somewhat separate from the old-timers who are really native to the region.

In 1973, my parents migrated again, this time from India to the United States. As my father still likes to brag, he and my mother came to this country with nothing but a medical degree from an Indian university, and about $300 in their pocket. My parents’ profile was not so different from that of thousands of other immigrants from various Asian countries, who came to the U.S. seeking economic opportunity after the reforms in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Four decades later, this wave of immigration has made the United States easily the most ethnically and racially diverse large nation in the world. As of 2000, the census recorded approximately 1.9 million Asian Indians living in the United States (counting people who checked two boxes on the Census for “race”), and this number is expected to be substantially higher as of 2010. By comparison in 2000, approximately 150,000 wrote in “Pakistani,” 43,000 wrote in “Bangladeshi,” and 20,000 wrote in “Sri Lankan” Unfortunately, the census data from 2000 gives us no way to ascertain how many immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka might have simply defined themselves, racially, as “Asian Indian,” since that is the closest category on the survey that does not require a write-in answer.

While the race question on the Census has for the most part remained the same from 2000 to 2010, there is one significant change, which comes in the form of a “hint” that has been added in the 2010 census to the category “Other Asian.” The hint, in parenthesis, points to a write-in box suggesting several nationalities that may be written in, including, “Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on.” The addition of this small hint in the 2010 Census might seem small – perhaps it is meant merely as a clarification, and not as a substantive change – but it raises some difficult questions for Americans whose families hail from the Indian subcontinent.

Why is it that my parents and I are “Asian Indian,” while our friends who came (more recently) from Pakistan – people who share our complexion, languages, and much else – are given a separate slot? Similarly, while Bengali-speaking Indians will almost certainly fill out “Asian Indian” for Question 9, Bangladeshis, who again share the same language, appearance, and many deep cultural links with Bengalis on the Indian side of the border, might feel encouraged to follow the lead of Pakistanis in identifying themselves as of another “race,” again under “Other Asian.” And this confusion can be seen yet again regarding the ethnic groups from the southern part of the Indian subcontinent: Tamil Indians, who speak a language and have a distinctive way of life that resembles their Tamil-speaking cousins in Sri Lanka. If Tamil Indians are “Asian Indians,” how are Tamil Sri Lankans “Other Asian” – which by the logic of the new hint, they must be? All of these groups now have significant immigrant representation in the United States. It is puzzling that despite the many cultural and historical commonalities shared by people from the Indian subcontinent, they are seen by the Census as separate “racial” groups.

The confusion over the nationalities of the Indian subcontinent is only one among several signs that the Census remains hopelessly confusing on “race.” How is it that there is a distinct box for the Samoan “race,” but no boxes for “Arab” or “Persian/Iranian,” both of which have substantial populations in the U.S., and who are likely to be split between “white” and “some other race”? And what about Afghan-Americans? Are they “Asian,” “white,” or “some other race”?

After some consideration of these categories, it becomes clear is that while some boxes in Question 9 on the Census (the “race” question) actually refer to categories everyone would agree relate to “Race” (“white,” “black,” “American Indian or Alaska native”), there are several others – “Asian Indian,” “Japanese,” “Chinese,” “Korean,” “Filipino,” “Vietnamese,” and “Samoan,” that refer to what are really nationalities. While official Census statements and directives suggest that the survey should have one question that relates to “ethnicity” (Question 8, addressed to Hispanics), and one on “race,” the reality is that Question 9 in particular remains a mish-mash of social groupings that could variously be described as “racial,” “ethnic,” or “national.”

Admittedly, the changes to the approach to race taken by the census are not all bad; indeed, the current configuration is a great improvement over versions of the “race” and “ethnicity” questions in earlier Census surveys. (Before 1970, for instance, Asian Indians, along with others from the Indian subcontinent, were all simply expected to check “white,” even if it was far from clear that they were going to be recognized as such by ordinary Americans.) The Frequently Asked Questions section of the current Census.Gov website, in response to the question, “Why doesn't the race question include more categories?” refers to a 1997 directive from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), setting up a general frame of reference that included five broadly defined racial groups. The 1997 OMB directive, which can be read in its entirety here [http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards/], also states that, “The categories represent a social-political construct designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based.”

But this statement by the OMB raises more questions than it answers. If the racial and ethnic categories on the U.S. Census are not “anthropologically or scientifically based,” on what ideas or facts exactly are they based? While one understands the imperative to gather broad population data, wouldn’t that data be better if it were construed in keeping with terms and social groupings derived from scientific anthropology?

Let us briefly take a stab at a better system of categorization for Asians. Admittedly, there is no magic bullet – and certainly no simple way to balance the challenge posed by balancing ethnographical accuracy against the evident need to be brief and keep the form simple enough that it can be easily understood and filled out. Still, I would suggest that the various “Asian” nationalities could best be re-defined into three large, regional groups: South Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian. Though obviously culturally heterogeneous in many ways, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, and Nepalis, come close to forming what ought to be an intelligible regional (if not “racial”) category – a category that anthropologists would call South Asian. Similarly, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese people might be identified as East Asian, while Filipinos, Burmese, Cambodians, Laotions, Thais, Indonesians, Fijians, Malaysians, and other Pacific Islanders, might all be Southeast Asians. Again, these three regional sub-categories of “Asian” are far from perfect, and each of the terms listed is abstract enough that it would probably need a list of “hints” along the lines of the hints currently given for “Other Asian.” While this change might not solve all of the analytic problems relating to Asian “racial” identity on the Census, it certainly would lead to better data than a survey that encourages Asian Indians and Pakistanis to see themselves as distinct “racial” groups.